- From: Al Gilman <asgilman@iamdigex.net>
- Date: Thu, 04 Jul 2002 11:21:13 -0400
- To: uri@w3.org
An interesting issue has come up in the context of the standard digital talking book <http://www.niso.org/standards/resources/z3986-2002.html>. [See also <http://www.loc.gov/nls/niso/>.] The dominant mode of distribution for these information objects is as file-sets in media, for example CD ROM. The specification makes heavy use of URI-references from and to XML and specifically SMIL in holding the composite object together. So references by URI-reference are a critical dependency of this technology. But from the CD-ROM the files are referenced by file: URLs. In the context of file: URLs it would appear that there is no common practice as to the case sensitivity of file paths. So we came up with the following candidate rules for file naming and reference within a talking book published as a fileset to be safe under conditions of media distribution and file-system access: 1) the file paths to distinct information objects (within the book) should be distinct under case-insensitive comparison. 2) references across files within the book should match under case-sensitive comparison. This pair of constraints-on-practice should make the set of file-paths within the book a namespace, and the URI-references a graph encoding, which are insensitive to the case-sensitivity characteristics of any given local file system. Is this an established FAQ in any community of which you are aware? Is there any good reason not to impose these constraints on practice in this application? Al
Received on Thursday, 4 July 2002 11:21:16 UTC